Many of the vehicle cockpit devices used in automobiles today are made adjustable to allow for increased occupant comfort. Such devices include the driver seat, steering wheel, pedals, seat belt restraints, and rearview mirrors including both interior and exterior. Some of these devices can be positioned with multiple degrees of freedom, the driver's seat being an example, whereas the driver's pedals and certain other devices are typically only adjustable linearly along a single path. While some devices may be electronically adjustable and others manually adjustable by the occupant, the use of motors for electronic adjustment is becoming increasingly common, and this allows for such other features as memory positioning systems so that a particular driver can return the various cockpit devices to a preselected stored position.
More recently, work has been done in the automotive industry to give vehicles the ability to recognize and/or adapt to an individual's morphology for such characteristics as height, weight, and lengths of individual limbs. This recognition occurs by either sensing a person's morphology via on-board sensory mechanisms, or possibly by allowing the occupant to input the information while in the vehicle. By whatever approach used, this information is utilized to provide automatic adjustment of various cockpit devices in an effort to assist the occupant in determining an optimum arrangement of the devices.
A complicating factor in automating the adjustment of multiple cockpit devices is the interrelationship among positioning of many of the devices. For example, seat position for the driver will influence the desired pedal position. To obtain maximum occupant comfort, these interrelationships should be accounted for by the algorithm used to adjust the various devices.